A Complete Guide For Minecraft

In this series, I (TheSirDrake) am going to guide you through the wonderful world of minecraft. I'm going to explain every single thing in minecraft, from changing your skin to effectively look for diamonds. From everything about villagers to enchanting your gear. This series started on 29/03/2015, a few weeks after the 1.8.3 release. I'm going to try to upload a new guide every other day (one day, one day not, one day, ...)

In this episode, I'm going to cover the very basics of Minecraft. We're not going to create a world yet, but we're going to talk a bit about the program itself and its features.

The Creation Of Minecraft

Minecraft is a sandbox game, created by Markus Persson (aka Notch), where you can do everything you ever dreamed of. The alpha version of the game was released on May 17, 2009 for PC and the full version was released on November 18, 2011. Minecraft is also available on other platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Xbox, Playstation, ... We aren't going to talk much about the other platforms, because we want to concentrate on the PC version. Minecraft has won several awards. In 2011, during the Game Developers Conference, it won the Innovation Award, Best Downloadable Game Award and the Best Debut Game Award. It won the Audience Award and The S. McNally Grand Prize too.
These aren't the only prizes, but if you want to know all of them, I suggest you go to the Minecraft Wiki.

Starting Up Minecraft

After you bought Minecraft, a .exe file should show up in your downloads folder. When you double-click on that, it should show a window called Minecraft Launcher. Here is where you can change your minecraft version by clicking on the Edit Profile button. Here you can change your version by going to  'Use Version'. Here's where you can also enable snapshots. Snapshots are pre-release versions of the game. When you clicked on Save, the same screen shows up again. The launcher screen contains the latest Mojang updates. Mojang is the company that created Minecraft, as well as Scrolls and Cobalt. On the right side, you can see the whole team that develops Minecraft. On the bottom middle of you screen, you can see a big button. In case it's your first time launching minecraft, it will be called Download & Play. If not, it will say 'Play'. When you have no Internet Connection, it will say Play Offline.

The Main Screen

When you start the game, a menu with 6 different buttons will show up.

Singleplayer
After clicking on Singleplayer, a list of all your worlds will show up. I'm not going to talk about this too much, because I want to save the information for the next lesson. Basically, this is were you can create as many worlds as you'd want!

Multiplayer
Life would be boring alone! When you clicked on this button, nothing should show up when you're new. You can add as many servers as you want to the Multiplayer menu. To find servers, you can go to the internet and look for 'minecraft servers'. Planetminecraft, also known as PMC, is arguably the best site to find servers. Just click on the 'servers' button and start looking. More information about servers and how to create a server will be explained in one of the next lessons.

Minecraft Realms
Minecraft Realms is a paying service by Mojang that hosts your own service. This is the easy, but paying, way to make your own server and let people join in. People that want to join your server will have to pay too. It's handy if you don't know anything about server hosting. If you have any further questions or bug reports, please contact realms@mojang.com. People with a Minecraft Realms server can choose to temporarily or permanently change their server in an Adventure or Minigame server with the Mojang Templates. To get the templates, please visit The Minecraft Realms Wiki.

Languages
The little icon with the earth on it is the Language Menu. Here you can choose the language you want to display the whole game in. One thing that a lot of people don't know is that there's a Pirate Language in the game. Just click on the Language Options menu and scroll down until you find the Pirate Speak (PIRATE). There's also an Esperanto language. Esperanto is a language, unbound to Minecraft, that was created by a certain man called Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof who wanted to create a language that would replace all languages. Unfortunately, only 2M people spoke the language, but never the less Minecraft included it. Enough history for today :-).

Options
Now here's where things get interesting. Minecraft has a lot of options. The really important ones are Music & Sounds, Video Settings, Resource Packs and Controls. In Music & Sounds, you can adjust how much you want to hear a certain type of noise. There's still a know bug that plays the music randomly. Video Settings is a bit more complicated. Having a good Video Settings can determine whether or not you computer behaves very laggy. Graphics is if you want everything to be nice and detailed (Fancy) or quickly loaded and a bit less nice (Fast). The second option is better for slow computers. Smooth lighing is a bit the same. If you enable it, you have a chance of lagging. GUI Scale is the scale of how big you want your GUIs (your ingame screens) to be. (I know I am skipping some options, but there are some that are not very important). Render distance determines how far you can see. 8-10 is normal. This is very important if you don't want a laggy game. This Render distance is calculated in chunks. chunks are surfaces of 16 by 16 blocks. The rest is self-explanatory. Resource packs is something we are going to talk about in another lesson. In 'Controls', you choose which button does what. Some controls like the List Players control doesn't work in Singleplayer. The Streaming options are for when you stream your game with Twitch.

Thank you

Thank you for reading the first tutorial. I will do my best to upload the next tutorial tomorrow. This will be about the Singleplayer Menu. Did you find a mistake or do you have to say something important? Please write a comment below.

-TheSirDrake